Link doesn't work for me. That being said, for programming more basic stuff in VS pretty much any desktop on market today should be fast enough. You might want to get 2 GB of RAM so you're not swapping too much, and a dual core might help you do other stuff while you're compiling. I don't know if the system in the link has a display included, but in VS the more pixels you have, the better, so a high-res display is always helpful.

I've been running VS 2008 on my old Pentium M/1 GB RAM Thinkpad and it works decently well even on this. Pretty much the only thing I've seen VS do to strain a machine is working with either MSSQL or the new .NET technologies (opening and drawing Windows Workflow Foundation files in particular).

Why don't you just Google up the system requirements for the programming software that you will be running? I looked up a few of those you listed and they seem to require only Pentium III and no more than a couple hundred MB of RAM. All desktops and laptops made since 2002 easily meet those requirements.

The X100e just came out, 8 years after 2002, so of course it's powerful enough. If I were you, I would worry more about the screen's resolution, because the X100e's 768 rows of pixels won't allow you to see that many lines of text. But considering that you want something very light and small, brand new, and very cheap, I think you have very limited options and all of them have 1366x768 or lower resolutions. So, just go for the X100e.

Thanks but to optimise it for programming is there anything i can do such as upgrade it etc. And after the upgrade will it be a good programming rig or what?

It is the X100e with 2GB of RAM and a 250GB hard drive and Windows 7 Professional with a 1.6GHz processor.I know this is not relevant but it is the black one because I want it to look professional.

Quote:

The X100e just came out, 8 years after 2002, so of course it's powerful enough. If I were you, I would worry more about the screen's resolution, because the X100e's 768 rows of pixels won't allow you to see that many lines of text. But considering that you want something very light and small, brand new, and very cheap, I think you have very limited options and all of them have 1366x768 or lower resolutions. So, just go for the X100e.

Also what do you mean by "all of them have 1366x768 or lower resolutions" ?

As well as the previous questions could you please give me your opinion on the X100e alongside the T42 for programming?

Thanks but to optimise it for programming is there anything i can do such as upgrade it etc. And after the upgrade will it be a good programming rig or what?

Like I said, the X100e (and all other desktops/laptops/netbooks made since 2002) is powerful enough for programming even without any upgrades. The only way you could make it a better programming rig would be to upgrade the screen to one with a higher resolution, but I am not aware of any 11.6" LCD that has a higher res than 1366x768. Even if there was, the upgrade would be expensive. Of course you could attach an external monitor with high resolution, but I don't think that's what you are asking about.

comptechexpert wrote:

Also what do you mean by "all of them have 1366x768 or lower resolutions" ?

It means all of the laptops that meet your requirements have low display resolutions, i.e. 1366x768, 1280x800, 1024x600, 1024x576, etc. Working on these low-res screens means you will have to scroll up and down a lot while working on your programs. I haven't done programming in over a decade but programmers often say that vertical screen real estate is very important. In other words, you want the second number in the resolution measurements (i.e. "768", "800", "600" and "576" in the above examples) to be as big as possible. The X100e has 1366x768, and 768 is very low. But like I said, given your criteria, you are limited to 1366x768. If you could tolerate used and bigger laptops, you would have higher-res options like 1400x1050 and 1600x1200.

comptechexpert wrote:

As well as the previous questions could you please give me your opinion on the X100e alongside the T42 for programming?

The T42 is much heavier and bigger, and you can't buy new ones any more. But it does offer 1400x1050 resolution in many (though not all) models.

Well I may plug in an external monitor,also I know where to get a second hand T42 so the T42 would be the main programming computer and the X100e would be my portable programming computer and as I say I may also use an external monitor, so alongside each other would the X100e and the T42 be a good programming setup.